The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.

Hide

Synopsis

Federico L. Büsch Buero writes in defense of art’s social scope as an aesthetic program for Latin America. He presents the left’s widespread opinions against modern art, which is uncommitted politically. Büsch Buero asserts that modern art without social content is pedantic artistry, a bourgeois aesthetic expression. The author maintains that art should help achieve awareness of the human rights. This author’s position adds to the local debate between the defenders of pure art and the defenders of political art; he builds on the definition of the former as decadent art.

Annotations

This document should be analyzed in the context of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s visit to Buenos Aires and of the controversy and debates that he caused in Argentinean intellectual circles. (See the group of documents that correspond to this matter: 733206, 734050, 734077, and 733182, among others.) Nevertheless, the document is important in itself because of the continent-wide circulation of the publication Claridad [Clarity] (1926–1941). Run by Antonio Zamora, it was considered the “platform for leftist thought” and was published to disseminate Latin American socialist thinking with the objective of participating in social struggles. Young leftist intellectuals of Latin America contributed to the publication. Leónidas Barletta and César Tiempo were the publication’s editors; they were linked to the Boedo Group, which defended socially conscious literature and was also a bastion for Claridad, the publishing house founded in 1922.

This text demonstrates the growing politicization of the debates concerning art in Argentina during the 1930s as well as the attacks made on the concept of an artistic modernity that did not take social problems into account.